Making lasting changes to personal behavior, such as weight loss or increasing fitness, can be a daunting task. Traditional methods for weight loss and fitness, including expert advice, diet regimens, books, and videos, are often ineffective due to their lack of emphasis on motivation and accountability. Internet-based weight loss and fitness programs are currently available, though they often suffer from the same deficiencies as the more traditional methods.
Social networking websites, such as Facebook.com, MySpace.com, and Twitter.com, provide members of the websites with access to an online community. Typically, a member of a social networking website is able to post and update member information, display pictures, join common interest groups, and send and receive messages from other members of the website. Twitter.com allows a member to update the member's information by sending a text message from the member's mobile phone. From this function, a member of Twitter.com is able to conveniently post the member's behavior in approximately real-time. However, the posting of member information is not automated, therefore accurate updates of member information require frequent and numerous text-based entries.
Activity-monitoring devices exist to make measurements of the activities of the users of the devices. A user of an activity-monitoring device can store the measurements in a computer for later viewing. However, the raw activity measurements can be difficult to interpret and identify because of the wide variety of potential activities. The activity measurements also generally do not give personalized or customized information, such customization is necessary due to the wide variation among different users undertaking similar activities.
The present invention addresses the difficult problem of affecting personal behavior and accurately and timely publishing the activity of a person. The present invention advances the art with a user-calibrated activity newsfeed on a social network capable of connecting people based on the activities.